Featured Image Credit: ABC
Topics: Film and TV, Robert De Niro, Celebrity
William Morgan
Playing up being weird or out-of-place has long been part of Aubrey Plaza's acting repertoire, from one of her very first appearances on screen in Mystery Team and in her breakout role on Parks and Recreation.
Plaza's unique delivery and natural talent for improv comedy have seen her star in dozens of films and TV shows in the 17 years since she first starred as moody intern April Ludgate - including a chance to work with movie legend Robert De Niro on Dirty Grandpa.
But her penchant for strangeness and commitment to Lenore, a young woman who is sexually obsessed with De Niro's septuagenarian character, ended up 'weirding out' her co-star, Plaza has said.
This included a sex scene between the actors that apparently got a little too real for the Taxi Driver star, after Plaza committed a little too hard to her sex-crazed character's bit in the 2016 comedy.
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“There was a lot of interesting stuff that went down, you know,” she said in a 2016 interview with Jimmy Kimmel, where she went into detail about the '10-hour' sex shoot, which involved the 40-year age gap pair taking a lot of cues from the director.
However, not all of them landed.
Detailing one of the grosser moments, Plaza detailed: “I’d try to get in there and suck on his nipples, and he was like batting me away, and I didn’t know if it was in character or not.”
This resulted in her learning that 'Bob does not like his nipple area paid attention to' after her acting got a bit too real.
Plaza joked: “Great, now he thinks that I wanted to do that.”
She said that she had essentially no contact with De Niro off camera, so the only time she spoke to him was in her role as a sex-crazed college student.
“I heard from my agent, who had spoken to his agent that he was legitimately scared of me,” the star told Kimmel.
Plaza added: “Every time I was around him, it was right before we started shooting, so I would be all over him, and I think I really freaked him out.”
Plaza spoke in more detail about this 'weird' dynamic with the Raging Bull actor in a 2022 interview with Variety, where she shared: “I didn’t really have a relationship with him off camera because he’s him.
“I didn’t have time to get to know him, he shows up in a puff of smoke and there’s no chatting at the water cooler.”
But while she thought De Niro was an enigmatic legend of cinema who just appeared to shoot the scenes, Plaza got the impression that her co-star was genuinely scared of her.
She said: “By the time he’d show up, I’m in character. My character had one goal: To have sex with him. I was acting totally insane as the character because we were about to shoot. I don’t think he understood that wasn’t me.
“You’d think he would because he’s an actor and an amazing one.”
But, perhaps, De Niro was also deep in character as, once filming had stopped, he didn't seem to know who Plaza was. She shared her recollection of a post-shoot party: “I showed up and he’s like, ‘Who are you sweetheart?’ and after that he was normal.
“At first I think I came on really strong. I did some questionable things I wouldn’t do anymore.”
This isn't the first time Plaza has spoken about filming intimate scenes, as the actress also learned what it was like to pleasure herself on camera when she worked on 2013's The To-Do List.
In an interview with Conan O'Brien, she explained that she originally thought her hand would just 'slowly go out of frame' as her character got to know her body, but when Plaza showed up on set it was a 'whole different thing'.
She recalled: “I asked the director 'what should I do' and she said 'masturbate like it says in the script'.”